After the insanity of last season, I find it hard to believe that any such power-polling can be defended anymore. Take the example of Missouri and OU. If the question is "Who would win on a neutral field?" then you had your anwser. It was OU. But no one ranked them that way. Why? Because Missouri's season was, overall, much better.

Based on this, and a plethora of other examples, I find the question of "Who would win on a neutral field" not only unanwserable, but almost totally irrelevent.

I apologize for highjacking the post like this, and if you disagree please say so.

By the way, Pitt might deserve some discussion now, at least relative to USF. Both have one good win [Kansas, and SF], but Pitt's 2nd win over Iowa trumps anything else USF has done. They do have the worse loss, so I could see why you would still leave them off.

So in the resume style, on comparing 1-loss teams. Let's say we have 3 teams; A, B and C. Team A and Team B are considered to be good (and have only one loss apiece), with Team A having beat Team B. However Team C (who isn't all that good) beat Team A. Do you really rank B far above A. It seems to me that even though A has a worse loss, they also have a much better win and should therefore be ranked ahead of B.

Amos - I tend to rank losses as more significant (and damaging) than wins, as I think the loss says far more about resume of the team.

In college football the ranking system has to substitue for the playoff system. Although it is a poor substitue at best, when you are talking about 119 teams, losses must be disqualifying to distinguish teams.

The classic example this year of loss importance is USC. Their marquee win against Ohio State really can't compare, in my opinion, to the disaaster of their loss to 2-3 Oregon State. I rank Ohio State higher than USC because, somewhat counter intutitively I admit, OSU lost to a higher quality team. To simply say USC is "better" than Ohio State because they beat them head-to-head ignores the complexities of college football - by that reckoning, you have to rank Oregon State ahead of USC, and so on.

I guess I weigh losses as more important because of the nature of college football's "post season" (if we can call it that). It is almost never the wins that make the difference in the end as to who goes to the big dance, it is the losses. Non-BCS teams are essentially eliminated by a single loss - BCS teams get a little more leeway, but losses count heavily. What was the difference between 2-loss LSU and 2-loss USC last year that allowed LSU to go to the BCS title game? Well, it was the weight of the bad loss to Stanford by USC.

By the end of the year, all serious contenders have good wins. You almost have to use losses to distinguish them.

Recognition

I can’t say enough about my two favorite blogs Get the Picture and Saurian Sagacity. There are not two more consistently thought-provoking and analytical college football blogs on the internet.
-Orange and Blue Hue

Rare is the SMQ shout out for the sole purpose of shouting out, but even rarer is the high substantive quality of disinterested naysaying in progress at Saurian Sagacity, where poster Mergz is steadily blowing up notions of "National Championships" new and old...-Sunday Morning Quarterback

In the old days, long before Urban Meyer roamed the sidelines at The Swamp, even before Steve Spurrier was slinging touchdowns and kicking game-winning field goals, some sports writers gave the University of Florida's football team a long-forgotten nickname: theSaurians. Today, two Florida alums pay tribute to those scribes of old as we enjoy the present and look toward the future.